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Portland Monthly

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Slide Show: Starvation Alley Cranberry Harvest

February 12, 2014

Starvation Alley's young owners, Jared Oakes and Jessika Tantisook

Oakes drives a water reel through the bog to dislodge cranberries from their vines and push them to the surface.

A harvester wades through the flooded cranberry bog

Dogs offer moral support.

Harvesters drag wide "booms" that corral the floating cranberries towards the shoreline.

Boggers don fashionable hip waders and boots to keep dry.

A helpful black lab provides quality control.

Once corralled, the harvest team pulls the floating haul towards the shoreline.

Because Starvation Alley is an organic cranberry bog, practices that normally control weed growth aren't allowed. As a result, the harvesters must weed by hand.

The concentrated cranberry haul, ready for processing.

A motorized machine pulls the cranberries from the water to be processed.

A bogger shovels huge piles of tangled cranberries for rinsing.

Volunteers of all ages help with the cranberry washing.

Pure, clean cranberries, ready to be frozen and cold-pressed.

Cranberry harvesting is hard, cold, wet work. A local Washington brew takes the edge off.

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On Long Beach Peninsula, that thin finger of sand extending from Southern Washington’s coastline, Starvation Alley Cranberry Farm is busy growing your new favorite cocktail mixer. In a dark bog surrounded by 10 acres of Northwest farmland, each late fall and winter young owners Jared Oakes and Jessika Tantisook wade through the waist-high water to skim and collect cranberries every October. Waterlogged boggers yank thick fistfuls of weeds entangling the crimson haul before sending the berries to be cleaned and flash-frozen. All photos by Giles Clement. See more of his work at gilesclement.com
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